They 100% should have communicated this change, absolutely unacceptable to change behavior without an extremely visible warning.
However, backing up these kinds of directories has always been ill-defined. Dropbox/Google Drive/etc. files are not actually present locally - at least not until you access the file or it resides to cache it. Should backup software force you to download all 1TB+ of your cloud storage? What if the local system is low on space? What if the network is too slow? What if the actually data is in an already excluded %AppData% location.
Similar issue with VCS, should you sync changes to .git every minute? Every hour? When is .git in a consistent state?
IMO .git and other VCS should just be synced X times per day and it wait for .git to be unchanged for Y minutes before syncing it. Hell, I bet Claude could write a special Git aware backup script.
But Google Drive and Dropbox mount points are not real. It’s crazy to expect backup software to handle that unless explicitly advertised.
Dropbox and GDrive desktop clients can be configured to sync files to a local directory. Backing them up with an additional platform would probably need some sort of logic like you described for VCS.
However, backing up these kinds of directories has always been ill-defined. Dropbox/Google Drive/etc. files are not actually present locally - at least not until you access the file or it resides to cache it. Should backup software force you to download all 1TB+ of your cloud storage? What if the local system is low on space? What if the network is too slow? What if the actually data is in an already excluded %AppData% location.
Similar issue with VCS, should you sync changes to .git every minute? Every hour? When is .git in a consistent state?
IMO .git and other VCS should just be synced X times per day and it wait for .git to be unchanged for Y minutes before syncing it. Hell, I bet Claude could write a special Git aware backup script.
But Google Drive and Dropbox mount points are not real. It’s crazy to expect backup software to handle that unless explicitly advertised.